InSight Captures Sunrise and Sunset on Mars

NASA's InSight lander captured a series of sunrise and
sunset images.

A camera on the spacecraft's robotic arm snapped the
photos on April 24 and 25, the 145th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. In
local Mars time, the shots were taken starting around 5:30 a.m. and then again
starting around 6:30 p.m. As a bonus,
a camera under the lander's deck also caught clouds drifting across the Martian
sky at sunset.

These images
are available as both "raw" and color-corrected versions. It's
easier to see some details in the raw versions, but the latter more accurately
show the images as the human eye would see them. Much farther from Mars than it is from Earth, the Sun appears
only about two-thirds the size that it does when viewed from Earth.

This is actually the second time InSight has captured
these daily events: The camera took practice shots on March 2 and 10. "It's been a tradition for Mars
missions to capture sunrises and sunsets," said Justin Maki, InSight
science team co-investigator and imaging lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "With many of our primary imaging
tasks complete, we decided to capture the sunrise and sunset as seen from
another world."

JPL
manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. InSight is part of
NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center
in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight
spacecraft, including its cruise stage and lander, and supports spacecraft
operations for the mission.

A
number of European partners, including France's Centre National d'Études
Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are supporting the
InSight mission. CNES provided the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS)
instrument to NASA, with the principal investigator at IPGP (Institut de Physique
du Globe de Paris). Significant contributions for SEIS came from IPGP; the Max
Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany; the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland; Imperial College London
and Oxford University in the United Kingdom; and JPL. DLR provided the Heat
Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3)
instrument, with significant contributions from the Space Research Center (CBK)
of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Astronika in Poland. Spain's Centro de
Astrobiología (CAB) supplied the temperature and wind sensors.